Solar power is great, but can we harvest power from other light sources? What could that power do? Bradley wanted to power a sink on nothing but the lights in the restroom. Visualize made it happen.
Capturing ambient light and putting it to use is not in and of itself that difficult. What’s tricky is managing and storing that power so that it’s there when you need it. Here’s the catch: you can’t use batteries. In the case of the Bradley nditeTM system, the concept was to capture the ambient light inside the restroom and use it to power the automatic sink. This has a couple of key advantages. First, there’s no need to install an a/c power outlet just to run the sink. Beyond that, the system makes the bathroom that much more energy efficient and sustainable, which has a lot of appeal for new facilities that are seeking to conserve as much power as possible. But there’s another interesting challenge. If the lavatory lights are on motion sensors, then the window to capture energy from the lights is very narrow.
Visualize explored several design alternatives for the solar power supply and then performed a design Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA). We developed a custom piece of electronic hardware via schematic development, breadboarding, preliminary testing, full PCB design finalization, and final testing. It worked. Because of our extensive internal talent resources, we were able to tackle this very complex electrical engineering problem completely in-house. In the end, we delivered a complete electronic hardware design book for the power supply along with fully functional prototypes.